January 28, 2015

In the Jungle

luciania achugar’s dark dance world is primordial. In “OTRO TEATRO: The Pleasure Project,” presented as part of the American Realness Festival, there is no beginning or end, and the space is filled with strange sounds and mottled light. The movement oozes, without boundaries or rules. Everything feels alive, and a little scary.

In a tweak to convention, achugar used the most conventional of proscenium stage theaters, the Playhouse at Henry Street Settlement House, and reversed our expectations of it. The performance began on the bare stage behind closed curtains, as the audience filtered in, leaning against the walls of the raw space, then filling in more of stage center around a few performers’ lying quietly at the edges of the spaces. We were offered swigs of liquor from bottles being passed, a working class toast to this “pleasure project.”

For about eighty minutes, the performers slithered, animal-like in the dark. They emerged slowly; it was hard to tell who was watching and who to watch. As a prone dancer began to squirm and moan, he slid among seated observers to not-quite-connect with a woman who might have been an audience member, but then sunk from a seated position onto her back, her legs splayed. They both groaned, sliding near and occasionally touching or overlapping body parts. It was sensual, though not-quite-sexual (those images came later.)

Around the space, other dancers became more evident. A woman leaned on and kicked a stage door; another slowly stood and dropped her head over her shoulders in a deep hunch. Movement spread, hidden among the crowd. The groans increased in volume and texture, as if we’d ventured into an urban jungle. Pieces of clothing were pulled off on the floor, and the performers were increasingly exposed. Noises emerged from behind the stage walls, clanking cans, crunching trash, rhythmic kicks and floor-pounding.

In the slowly morphing scene, everyone was compelled to move, milling around the stage to find the source of new noises or glimpses of raised legs and buttocks, or to watch another presumed audience member become part of the animal kingdom in this sensual, body-rich work. Finally, ten dancers, including the choreographer, were sliding and moaning, their thighs and breasts emerging from discarded coverings. The already dimly lit stage (only lit by fluorescent working lights) went black. There was no light but the glowing red “Exit” signs -- a notable metaphor, since there are no apparent exits in achugar’s world. The audience stood awkwardly in place, now only hearing the chaos of sound.

One of the dancers, Molly Lieber, wrapped herself in part of the stage curtain and pulled it slightly to reveal the empty auditorium. Light rippled in from the fully lit, but hidden, house. Other dancers slid under the curtain and pulled more aside, and some of the dancers rolled over the lip of the stage and clambered around the seats. As the house came into view, several audience members found their way around the dancers, and into seats, too – a more comfortable (and central) vantage point for the movement that was now happening all around us.

The cast climbed and slid around the rows, lizard-like. As more clothing was discarded, the movement became more explicitly sexual, as if the dancers were devolving on the evolutionary scale. Eventually a few slid, naked, out the back door of the theater, through the lobby, and – briefly – into the street, where the sound of a police siren (and the 10 degree weather) drove them back inside. Laughter coming from the lobby suggested that a boundary had, finally, been pushed too far. And just in time. The audience had devolved, too, milling out, greeting each other and the dancers they knew. It was a fitting close, not with a bang, but a whimper. With no chance to applaud or appreciate the performers, the audience migrated back to our humdrum world, from achugar’s jungle of movement and darkness.